Midnight Oil announce first world tour in 15 years

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It’s the news we’ve wanted to hear for years and have been sweating on for over nine months. One of Australia’s finest rock bands, Midnight Oil, have announced dates for their return to the live arena.

While the band will be back in action in just over two months, most Australian audiences have a painful wait before they get to see the national icons. Dates in Australia’s capital cities aren’t set to happen until October, serving as something of a (hopefully) triumphant homecoming for the band.

The only early Aussie date we get is a warm up show at a pub this April, a notorious old stomping ground for the Oils over the years. Given the size of that venue (and the fact that OH&S laws are far stricter these days), we can't imagine securing a ticket for that one will be easy.

The band will start their The Great Circle tour in Brazil in May, with dates in Europe, the US, Canada and New Zealand.

They will play over 50 shows on the world tour, their biggest since the late 1980s.

The Australian leg of the tour starts in Darwin and takes in a raft of regional areas and capital cities, with the band playing huge outdoor venues in most areas.

They've also enlisted an incredible array of supports. The likes of Spiderbait, The Living End, Dan Sultan, The Jezabels, Dan Sultan, John Butler Trio, A.B. Original and a whole heap more will be opening up these massive shows.

At least we’ll have plenty to keep us busy while we wait for those Aussie dates, with reissued versions of all of each of their albums and a whole heap of archival recordings and rarities all set for release throughout the year.

It’s a good time to be a Midnight Oil fan.

Midnight Oil split up in 2002, after almost 30 years of delivering hard-hitting, heavily political rock'n'roll to a worldwide audience. The band reformed to play at the WaveAid fundraiser in 2005 and the Sound Relief benefit in 2009. These have been the ban'd only shows together as frontman Peter Garrett persued a career in politics and the remainder of the band kept busy with other projects, notably surf rock band The Break.